Featuring light and projection installations by Darya Fard & Craig Coleman, the experience transforms the Bibb Theatre and Newberry Building into temporary works of art, showing possibilities for new uses for these historic spaces.
Darya Fard is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines universal connection by creating metaphorical, symmetrical, and symbolic mythical creatures inspired by Persian poetry, mythology, and psychological studies. Darya received her MFA degree in Drawing, Painting and Printmaking from GSU in 2022 and her BFA and MA degrees in Iran, Tehran at SCU, and Alzahra universities. Her primary aesthetic concern is in intersecting visual art, including printmaking, photography, video, installation, sound, and dance, with Persian literature, mythology, and psychology. She has recently begun incorporating scientistic studies and natural phenomena relative to her work.
At the Newberry Building
1. The Valley of Quest:
Where the Wayfarer’s heart is cleansed and their spiritual quest begins, casting aside all dogma, belief, and unbelief.
2. The Valley of Love:
Where reason is abandoned for the sake of love. The fire of love, causing pain and madness reveals the world of spirit.
3. The Valley of Knowledge:
This is the last limited valley, where worldly knowledge becomes utterly useless. The Wayfarer begins to face the mystery contained within divinity’s revelation.
4. The Valley of Detachment:
Where the Wayfarer endowed with wealth and power of the spiritual world gives up all desires and attachments to the world. Here, what is assumed to be “reality” vanishes.
5. The Valley of Unity:
Where the Wayfarer realizes that everything is connected and that the Beloved is beyond everything, including harmony, multiplicity, and eternity.
6. The Valley of Wonderment:
Where, entranced by the beauty of the Beloved, the Wayfarer becomes conscious of the vastness and glory of creation and finds that he/she has never known or understood anything.
7. The Valley of Spiritual Richness:
Where the self disappears into the universe and the Wayfarer becomes timeless, existing in both the past and the future.
Craig Coleman is an artist who works in photography, installation, and digital media. Coleman received his BFA from Florida State University and his MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Currently he is Professor of Art and Chair of the Art Department at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. His projects connect ideas and processes from experimental film with digital art and installation.
At the Bibb Theater
This work is meant to highlight the building's history as a theater by turning it inside out, bringing the projected "film" from the inside to the exterior wall of the theater.
I want to call attention to what used to happen inside the building in it's past, and show potential for it's future. When a building goes empty for many years, it becomes forgotten, it fades into the background. Architects such as Samuel Mockbee (co-founder of the Rural Studio at Auburn) have spoken about the relationship buildings have to the soul and to memory. The projections on the front (face) of the building make the structure bring the building back to life, in a sense. In this piece, I imagine these images as the mind of the theater made visible for us to see. The filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, has written about using film to show the mind's eye, the interior of the mind, possibly the soul. Light is the essence of film but also a metaphor for knowledge, vision, and spirituality, so it seems appropriate to use light and projection here as a metaphor for the mind's eye of the Bibb Theater.
The pink light is a reference to the Yoshino Cherry trees in the park across the street from the Bibb theater and to Macon's Cherry Blossom Festival, a significant marker of the city's identity. It also points to the prominence of the Cherry trees and other flowers all over the city of Macon. This part of the piece is meant to be interactive, Viewers can stand under the theater roof and be bathed in the light, (a kind baptism) just as they are bathed in pollen every spring. Viewers can take selfies and are encouraged to share these reflections of self with others and consider all the associations of the color pink. The motto for the Cherry Blossom festival is "Think Pink," standing under the roof of the theater, a viewer can be absorbed by pink light, they can embody being pink, they become pink.
SHINE is made possible by the Downtown Challenge Fund of the Community Foundation of Central Georgia.
Presented by NewTown Macon & produced by Dashboard.
